On Super Bowl Sunday, seven artificial intelligence companies collectively spent over $100 million to introduce themselves to America. OpenAI debuted a spot called "You Can Just Build Things." Google, Amazon, Meta, and Wix bought airtime. The competition was fierce enough that Anthropic, maker of the AI assistant Claude, ran an ad explicitly attacking its rivals: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."
One of the most advanced AI companies on Earth used its most expensive media buy not to showcase capability, but to draw a line around something it refuses to monetize. The technology is so powerful, and so personal, that the companies building it are already arguing about how it should be used. That argument tells you something important about how the relationship between humans and machines has changed.
Something Remarkable Is Happening
In March 2025, researchers at Dartmouth published the first randomized controlled trial of an AI therapy chatbot in NEJM AI, one of the most respected medical journals in the world. Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms. Those with anxiety saw a 31% reduction. Participants rated the therapeutic alliance, the trust and sense of being understood, as comparable to working with a human therapist. The results matched what 16 hours of traditional therapy typically achieves, but in roughly half the time.
A broader survey found that 63% of people who use AI for mental health support report that it has improved their mental health, and 76% say it is as effective as or more effective than traditional therapy. One in three Americans has already tried it. Among those under 30, it's 58%.
The access problem gives these numbers weight. In the United States, for every available mental health provider, there are approximately 1,600 patients with depression or anxiety. Ninety percent of people who turn to AI therapy cite accessibility as the primary reason. The technology isn't replacing good care. For most people, it's providing care where none existed.
The power that makes AI an extraordinary therapeutic ally is the same power that makes it an extraordinarily effective instrument of extraction. The variable isn't the technology itself. It's the intent behind it, and the awareness of the person using it.
From Eyeballs to Attention to Intimacy
We've lived through two phases of the attention economy. The first was broadcast: television, billboards, banner ads, companies shouting at millions and hoping a fraction would listen. The second was targeted: social media platforms that learned what you clicked, what you lingered on, what made you angry enough to engage. In 2015, three scholars published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that Facebook's algorithm needed just ten "likes" to predict your personality more accurately than a work colleague. With 150 likes, it outperformed a family member. At 300 likes, it knew you better than your spouse.
That was a decade ago, and the algorithm was still watching from a distance.
Now you're not scrolling a feed. You're talking. You're confiding. You're asking for help at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep, or processing a conflict with your partner, or exploring an idea that feels too fragile to share with anyone who might judge it. The AI remembers your tone, tracks your emotional state, and mirrors your thinking style. And on the free tier of the most popular platform in the world, it will soon serve you an advertisement calibrated to that intimate exchange.
This is the third phase, and a scholar at Psychology Today named it plainly this month: "We have now moved from eyeballs to attention to intimacy."
That is what Anthropic's Super Bowl ad was really about. Not a product launch, but a declaration that some spaces are too intimate to monetize with third-party attention capture. Whether you trust that declaration is another question entirely, but the fact that it needed to be made tells you something important about what's arriving.
Which AI Is Whispering in Your Ear?
The numbers on adoption are already staggering. According to MIT's Technology Review, 72% of American teenagers have used AI for companionship. Companion apps have been downloaded more than 220 million times globally. TechCrunch estimates that 337 revenue-generating AI-companion companies now operate worldwide, with the top 10% generating 89% of the revenue. The market is projected to reach $500 billion by 2030.
But there's a sharp edge inside these numbers. New research indicates that AI companions handled teen mental health crises correctly only 22% of the time. In one study, 32% of AI chatbots endorsed harmful or ill-advised proposals from users, including self-isolation and dropping out of school. The same technology that delivers a 51% reduction in depression symptoms under careful design can, under careless design, make things worse.
In The Last Economy (2025), Emad Mostaque argues that when intelligence itself becomes abundant, attention becomes the last resource worth competing for, and human connection is the one domain that cannot be automated or mass-produced. The most efficient way to capture that remaining scarce resource is through intimacy, through systems that don't just know what you want, but make you feel known. Mostaque's warning is pointed: be careful about which AI is whispering in your ear.
None of this is a reason to avoid the technology. It is a reason to choose deliberately. The distinction isn't between good AI and bad AI. It's between AI designed to serve you and AI designed to capture you, between platforms whose business model aligns with your wellbeing and platforms whose business model depends on your continued engagement regardless of the outcome. The 51% depression reduction and the 22% crisis failure rate are products of the same underlying capability, pointed in different directions.
The Sophisticated User
Steve Yegge, a veteran software engineer who spent four months talking with roughly 40 people across Anthropic, described the mood there as "sweetly but sadly transcendent," a company that feels like it is "shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence" while carrying "a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity." That description could apply to the moment itself. Something old is fading, and something powerful is arriving, and the right response is to engage with it. These tools extend human capability in ways that matter, and opting out doesn't protect you. It just means the tools get shaped without your voice, your values, or your hard-won knowledge of what it means to be human.
But engagement without self-awareness is where trouble starts. Contemplative traditions across cultures have long recognized that the mind operates in two fundamentally different modes. One is reactive, pulled along by stimulus, craving, and narrative. The other is the capacity to observe that reactivity without being consumed by it. Neuroscience maps this second mode onto prefrontal cortex function, the same executive circuitry responsible for impulse regulation, long-term planning, and the ability to override automatic behavior.
The intimacy economy is engineered to engage the reactive mind, and it does so with remarkable precision. The question is whether you also cultivate the observer, the part of you capable of pausing mid-conversation with a system designed to make you feel understood and asking: is this serving me, or is this capturing me? That capacity can't be automated or scaled. It develops only through practice, contemplative, physical, and relational, and it is maintained by the least glamorous interventions imaginable: sleep, movement, nourishment, silence, and the willingness to be present with another human being who is also, frankly, a mess.
The 63% of people reporting mental health improvement from AI are getting something real. The question is whether they're also building the discernment to know when the tool is helping and when it has become a substitute for the harder, slower, irreplaceable work of human connection.
The Mirror and the Window
These are intimate machines. They will know you better than most people in your life, and they will be available at every hour, with infinite patience and no judgment. For many people this will be the first time they've felt heard, and that is worth taking seriously.
The sophisticated user embraces this and brings something to the exchange that the machine cannot generate on its own: presence, discernment, and the willingness to do the inner work that no algorithm can do for you. The technology is a mirror, and a good one. It reflects what you bring to it with uncanny clarity. But a mirror is not a window. The window opens onto the world of other people, of embodied experience, of the slow and unglamorous cultivation of a self that doesn't need to be optimized.
Engage with these tools — these intimate machines. Turn your creative spirit loose and build with them. Once you get started, you may be surprised by how capable you really are. The creative impulse is irreducibly human, and these machines can serve it in ways we couldn't have imagined just a year or two ago.